It remembers a time before roads,
an antediluvian time when you were
not here, not even a memory or
a scent of you on the water. It knows
you are here now, and roads, cars,
armored things ready to crush
armored things with hooked beaks
and spiked tails. It remembers, too,
that the swamp on the other side
might hold ducklings, frogs, some
soft, unarmored creatures that
make it a worthwhile venture,
this slow crossing in a fast world.
Tag Archives: nature
Paloma in the City: NaPoWriMo 2015, Day 22
She pieces the morning together,
this pigeon; I hear her beak
clack against the sidewalk
outside the city college
each time she tries to burst
a brittle plastic wrapper that holds
a few small crumbs of something.
I double back and offer her
a bit of crust from the leftover pizza
that I’ve brought for lunch.
And I wonder a few things:
If anyone saw, if I’m now part of
the Urban Pigeon Feeding Problem,
if I’m bound to get a ticket,
and also if it was best
to fill her stomach with dough.
But I gave her something—
what I had—and she seems
glad to take it, shaking free
one bite at a time as people
weave around her work.
The next day, I’ll recall
a drink I once had in Mexico:
tequila and grapefruit soda.
Paloma.
He Pierces the Morning with Fresh Urgency: April 2015 PAD Chapbook Challenge
In our courtyard,
in the tortured and trimmed
hawthorn tree, whose blossoms
send their stink into our front window
every early June,
a male cardinal puffs himself up
in a topmost branch
and sings so loudly,
so persistently,
that I worry that he’s calling
for his lost mate.
So often, you see them
first one and then the other;
when you spot the flash of red,
you know to look also for rosy brown,
winter, spring, summer, or fall.
And now there is only red,
and he pierces the morning with
fresh urgency.
Maybe it’s only an announcement:
This is my tree.
But then, where is she?
Maybe in the bushes below.
Maybe waiting until I go away,
until I stop watching and listening
for the answer to his call.
If You Are Afflicted
If you are afflicted with pear blight,
you will feel it in your limbs. If you
fail to blossom, or if your blooms are
nipped, browned by an errant frost, then
you will have a silent, solitary spring,
visited neither by bees nor wasps, exempt
from the frenzy of making fruit. Take heart:
This may be only for one year, or two,
and you can still make leaves and talk
to yourself, bend in the wind or brace
against rain, which will still come (unless
there’s also a drought). You may be visited
by some manner of small, sucking bug.
If you have no blooms — if you’re not
making fruit — you might find there are
worse companions than these, worse ways
to pass a lonely season or two, or three.
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Also … Hey, I’m back! I took an extended Christmas break but will now resume the daily posts for a while.
Hornbeam
Whatever else happened between the leaves
or in the hammock, Louise was not about
to stick around to find out. Norman told her
to come for a walk, so that’s what she did,
meeting him in the shade of the hornbeam
tree, admiring its catkins. She always liked it
when a man knew trees: Not just, Meet me
under that big, round shade tree, but
Meet me under the hornbeam. Maybe
Meet me under the hornbeam, Dear
would be better. But there was time
enough for that, she thought, more than
enough evenings left in June, More
than enough Junes left for all that.
Winter’s Wing
Speaking of travel and snowy owls,
white wings of this weather,
the dishwater sky awaiting heavier
clouds than these, another round
of snow; we are pulled into
the polar vortex again and again.
It’s because we’re heating the seas,
making soup out of creatures
we have no interest in eating.
Still, there’s something about
winter again, the real winter,
how it puts you someplace else,
like the inside of a closet, muffled
and warm when your parents are
having a party, and you are a child.
The laughter and the clink of ice,
present, distant. It’s like that,
under winter’s wing—your blood
thick and quiet, hungry for meat.
Check out Open Link Night at dVerse Poets every Tuesday p.m.!
Fig Wasps
I tell you a tale as big as a kite,
and I fly it into your fig tree.
It rattles the wasps from their
work in your figs, their offices
of pollinating, egg-laying, death.
They are annoyed, and they sting
with the knowledge that
there’s no tale bigger than
their own. It is, they are certain,
the greatest story the sun ever told.
If it’s Tuesday p.m., check out Open Link Night at dVerse Poets.
Concealed
in which you never see the thing
in which the thing is a shark
or a shadow of a shark
a shadow of its former self
ocean floors have a way of concealing
as if it’s all so much light and shadow
to say nothing of fins
to say nothing of
teeth
Using one of today’s prompts from Robert Brewer’s PAD Challenge. If it’s Tuesday p.m., check out Open Link Night at dVerse Poets.
Zinnia
Death is a preventable fiction. I am blooming now
like never before, standing tall and so healthy that
surely I will be passed over. Only someone truly
cruel would look at my orange petals, the mosaic
I have made out of sun, to represent the sun,
and say I should not live to see December, then
another spring, another summer. I will be the first
of my kind, in our portion of earth, to make it
through to the other side—because I have
made myself beautiful. I have been useful.
The bee came again yesterday, but she was
slower, less hungry. Still, she whispered her plan
to me, how she will fly so fast, up into the cold sky,
that no one can catch her. I told her I will be here
when it’s safe to come back. I will feed her then.
Check out Open Link Night at dVerse Poets every Tuesday p.m.
It’s a Simple Song
Sometimes, I sing out loud
on the telephone wire.
Sometimes, I clap my hands.
I had a place somewhere
among the bullfrogs once;
it was low there, and I sang
low. When I’m with the
little birds, I sing high. If you
need to know your place,
ask the porcupine. He knows
your name; he mutters it
to himself, just like mine.
After “A Place in the Choir” by Bill Staines. Another great request from my friend Jud! The song begins at 4:20, but the intro is pretty funny. His impression of a porcupine is not to be missed.
Also, if it’s still Tuesday p.m./wee hours of Wednesday, check out Open Link Night at dVerse Poets.
Marilyn Rauch Cavicchia 